Cui – On My Way

[iTunes Store]

CCTV, the biggest video content owner of China and the state-owned tv station, has released its official free application for iPhone platform: CCTV National Mobile TV.

Built upon CCTV’s news, sports, entertainment, music, animation and other content, this product provides you with a brand-new experience of watching TV programs from China Central Television (CCTV).

凭借着CCTV旗下新闻、体育、娱乐、影视、音乐、动漫等强大的资源优势，该产品为您提供了内容丰富的各类精彩节目。CCTV手机电视会对国内外各类热点 事件，各类重大体育赛事，各类综艺节目进行详细的播报。您可以随心随意选择，随时随地收看CCTV众多拥有独家版权的精品节目。

I’ve tried it yesterday. My first try is in the morning and it’s a failture ‘coz all the videos cannot be played at all. However later in the evening when I tried again, the video played very smoothly. All that I can say is it’s not as stable as expected.

So far all the content are not live, but VoD. However, the news part are updated so frequently, which makes it almost ‘live’(almost as soon as it’s played on TV).

The videos are from 32 well-known columns covering 8 channels(CCTV 1~5,CCTV-7,CCTV-12 and CCTV-News) . Besides, there are also 9 topic-centered videos including Shanghai EXPO and 11th National Sports etc. As to the Top chart, it’s just another view of the 32 columns.

It’s not as good as expected, but better than nothing.

Just got a notification email announcing the launch of this cool site: mobile.ie. Here’s the brief intro:

Mobile.ie is a website dedicated to keeping you up to date with all the news and buzz in the world of mobile technology. Mobile devices and services are steadily shaping up the world we live. As I’m sure you’ll know new devices bring better technology, making us more mobile than ever before. Our goal is to keep you in the front row of the upcoming revolution. We’ll give our best to cover all the important news.

It seems the site is powered by Wordpress, same with this site. Besides, the theme is very simple, exactly that kinda of my favorite style. Cool!

About the content, the slogan says all – absolute mobile. If you wanna learn about the latest cool and new mobile devices, mobile.ie is the one you should bookmark or subscribe. To name a few, iPhone,Android,BlackBerry blablabla. Even though there are not so many reviews so far, each of the reviews is in high quality and worth of your time.

Only one thing, it’s not optimized for iPhone so far. Perhaps, mobile.ie could take use of iWPhone plugin for that, the one I’m using now.

In the morning of July 12, 2008(Beijing Time), as usual, I launched Google Reader from my Safari’ bookmarks in the iphone and wanna see if anything could interest me a little.

Guess what? I didn see the old and familiar Reader interface. Instead, i saw the New one. Actually i did try it when it’s still beta before. I even bookmarked it, for later use.

The New Reader is cool, in some way. However, there’s one very important feature missing compared to the Old one: mobiled the targeted html pages. Let me remind you of that with the following screenshot.

Why is it such an important feature, anyway? You may wonder. Well, I’ve explained before on this post. And after some googling, I’ve found i’m not the only one.

There’s a post titled See original – mobile vs. full HTML – Please fix created by mangala8 in the Google Reader Team’s groups, which exactly says the same thing. I already left my agree comment there.

So in all, we’d like to see this cut feature could be able to appear in the New Reader again some time in future.

I have no idea of how Google chooses the features for their product, but I do hear that Google treats user feedback very seriously. Hopefully Google will not let us down this time.

SwirlyMMS v1.0 beta is finally out there.

It’s long-waited as it promises some big enhancements, like built-in MMS reader, sound and video mms support, mms email-like actions like reply and forward, and something more as well.

Just one more thing, if you wanna use it later on your phone, you have to pay for that. $8, that’s the price. Not free any more.

Well, That’s understood. Good work deserves more.

Keep good working and they’ll get a good luck.

BTW, this is a report from iResearch(chinese), by which you may know how big the MMS cake is.

iPhone 2 DOES has some new features which is really attractive to me, like native support to Chinese in Email and IME, like GPS, etc. Exchange support, not so much. I have no plan to use personal my iPhone to check those company emails.

Even though so far the 3-rd party apps cannot be allowed to be running, I’m pretty sure it’s a matter of time. I do have a strong belief on those very talented guys in the community like the iPhone Dev Team, even I have completely no idea of who they are, where they come from and how they look like.

Perhaps, I should start thinking of reselling my iPhone, just like everyone else. The best target is someone here in Beijing,China.

Actually my iPhone works pretty good in every functionality. No physical damage at all. If you decide to get it you will also have my full support in my convenient time. Software only,btw.

Before SwirlyMMS offcially starts supporting MMS reading function, now you can take use of the Books.app as the a temp MMS reader. And here’s the how-to:

1.install both Books.app and SwirlyMMS from Installer.

Make sure both work well. You’d better download at least one book and one piece of MMS to check if they can func as expected. If you can’t, then you have to manually create the regarding folders.

2.enter command line by either Term-v100 on your iphone or Putty on your compute. You know how to do it, do you?

3.run the following command one by one(case sensitive):

cd /var/root/Media/EBooks

ln -s /var/mobile/Media/MMSFiles MMS

4.done.

So, now you can see basically the whole point is to fool the Books.app by a fake ‘book link’ which actually is where the MMS files are saved. One of the good thing is, now i can read Chinese MMS while i can’t in MobileText.app. Also, i can delete the obsolete MMS files easily by the Books.app’s Delete function.

So, SwirlyMMS.app + Books.app = A Full MMS.app, not bad, huh

Source: 关于SwirlyMMS的使用问题的分析–先谈乱码的解决 【原创】

The reason i decided to update my iphone is as below:

1. the unlock works for sure.
2. the newly updated iCosta 1.1.0 supports 1.1.4 now.
3. of course 1.1.4 has some improvements as well. Personally what i’m interested is the one about cell signal.
And here’s the steps i did. In all, pretty easy and smooth.

1.Use iTunes to sync your iphone and make sure everything backuped. Then Shift+Restore to 1.1.4.
2.Download iPlus 1.2 and International Pack. Credit goes to aviegas.
3.Unzip the iPlus1.2.zip to your local harddisk, say c:\iplus1.2. Rename the existed payload.zip to payload-zip.bak. Then copy the downloaded payload_international.zip to c:\iplus1.2 and rename it as payload.zip.
4. Go to c:/iplus1.2 under command line and then run iplus -u. After couple of reboot and boom, the iphone has been activated, jailbroken and unlocked!!
5. Launch iTunes and restore back all of your original settings. and you are done!!

So for now I’m on 1.1.4 now, both firmware and baseband. And i checked youtube, google maps and Settings as well. All works fine. Last but least, i saw the cell signal. So, are you gonna stay where you are or go to 1.1.4 next?

Finally SwirlyMMS comes to the long-expected version 0.3, where MMS receiving is supposed to be done.

It’s said the new version should be available on Installer in 24 hrs. For people waiting it for such a long time like me,  just can’t wait any more. So here’s how it works on my 1.1.3 iphone(soft-upgraded, i.e. 1.1.2 BB):

1.Uninstall the previous v0.2 and restart iphone(restart may not be necessary, but anyway, that’s what i did);
2.Add http://swirlyspace.com/SwirlySpace.xml into Installer’s source and refresh. You should see a new category called ‘SwirlySpace’ (If you can get the new version in your installer by update checking, then it’s not necessary to add this new source);
3.Enter this category and install it. At this moment it’s 0.3.1_1;
4.Power off and on iphone and launch SwirlyMMS(slide to the red bar and power off. Yes, that’s what the author says);
5.Config the settings like this( i’m a Chinese Mobile GoTone subscriber here in Beijing. Guess it should apply to those who also use China Mobile service and have a data package as well):

MMSC: mmsc.monternet.com
Proxy: 10.0.0.172
APN: cmwap
Username: cmwap (actually this was set by the app itself, according to the APN you’ve given)
6. Now you can try sending and receiving MMS now. Below is my testing result. In short, it WORKS!!

If SwirlyMMS says something like ‘EDGE is unvaible’ when you try to fetch MMS, just turn off your WiFi and try again. Don forget to give it couple of minutes. That’s my case, at least.

Only one little bug: the picture I received sizes 400×300 while it’s set as 300×400 in SwirlyMMS.  I may try more and confirm this.

Anyway it works. and that’s the most important thing, isn’t it?

Update(Mar.3,2008): No luck on the most latest v0.3.2 any more. It keeps telling me that EDGE/GPRS is unavailable, which,actually, is not true for sure in my testing

Update(Mar.5,2008): v0.3.3 works like a charm now!!

1. Newly added ‘Add subscription’
See screenshots above. By clicking that link, you will be navigated to the feed discovering page, where you can easily search and add more subscriptions you like.

2. clicking ‘See original’ will Open a new browser window
See the picture below for the page where the ‘See original’ link is.

It’s a much more browsing-friendly than before while opening the link in the same window. You will know it if you read news via feeds every day like me.

It seems the designers have done a very deep research and study on iphone’s Safari. ‘Coz the whole layout of the browser window is very similar to Safari’s,  from the top address bar, the middle main browser window, to the bottom toolbar.

Sure it’s just a spec and very far from a product yet. However, it’s a real first step anyway, just as Mozilla Links says so. So I feel excited about it ‘coz it means my dream of seeing firefox on iphone comes closer than before.